While interning at a biotechnology company the summer before
college, junior Ian Leaman was tasked with generating leads for
their sales team. His job was to research potential clients by
searching the internet for details on scientists and their
experiments. "The whole time, I knew there had to be a better way to
do this than scraping through hundreds of research papers," said
Leaman.

Three years later,
Mimir Insights, the company he founded with
classmates Ethan Kopit and Jon Arbaugh, has built a new way for
biotech companies to investigate and generate potential customers.
Mimir captured the first place prize—$20,000—in the
General/High-Tech Ventures track of the
$100k New Ventures
Competition this spring, an annual contest sponsored by Tufts Gordon
Institute that is open to recent alumni, faculty, staff,
undergraduate, and graduate students.

During his first few weeks at Tufts, Leaman met Kopit, a fellow
resident of Metcalf Hall, and Arbaugh, a classmate in an ExCollege
class on startups and technology. "The idea for Mimir came pretty
naturally," recalls Kopit. "The three of us were discussing our
summer internships and Ian thought there must better way to go about
the research Ian was conducting. We were all interested in
entrepreneurship and seeking an opportunity and a good team. As far
as we knew, there were no other products in the market that solved
this problem.

Their goal was to reduce the time it takes for biotech salespeople
to find potential customers. Their product has evolved over time.
Initially, Leaman envisioned Mimir as a life sciences web
crawler—essentially an internet bot that searches the web for
relevant information. "That would have been an extraordinary
undertaking," Kopit recalls. "Since then, we have focused on what we
can do with less data." Today, Mimir Insights has three clients, and
helps users search over a million investigator profiles more
efficiently by aggregating grants, publications, and clinical trials
into a single, searchable database of researcher profiles. Kopit
compares Mimir to LinkedIn: "In the same way you would search
LinkedIn to learn about someone's professional experience, you can
search Mimir to find researchers, their current experiments and
details of their grant funding."

As full-time students and entrepreneurs, the three students find the
schedule demanding: each of the co-founders spends 20-25 hours per
week on their business. As primarily self-taught entrepreneurs, they
have had a learning curve. For Kopit, the biggest challenge was
learning where to start. "If I said 'Tomorrow you're going to found
a company that makes bicycle gears out of carbon fiber,' your first
question would be 'Well, how do I do that?' It took a long time for
us to learn which questions to ask or how to ask for help. It seems
basic, but that was 50 percent of the work."

A political science major, Kopit believes his study of political
theory has helped him think about business in new ways. "Political
philosophy is about the design of human systems, and considering the
best ways for people to live and how we can build systems to
maximize that 'best way," he explains. The thought process he
employs in his political philosophy major has helped the team
approach some aspects of the business differently. "It has
contributed to why we think critically about what kind of culture we
want, how to design pricing models and really any interactions we
have," says Kopit. "We chose our pricing scheme because it fits our
users and the experience we want for them, not because it's the
industry standard."

Leaman and Arbaugh, both computer science majors, focus on data and
product management, and development, respectively. Arbaugh says he's
gained the ability to think critically when solving problems and
building professional quality software from his computer sciences
classes. For Leaman, Programming Languages and Machine Structure and
Assembly have been essential courses in his work for Mimir.

Seven other Tufts undergraduates—researchers, engineers, and
marketing managers—now work for Mimir: juniors John Bailey, Arlo
Clarke, Qais Iqbal, Collette King, Ian Luo and Abdisalan Mohamud;
and sophomore Gabriella Bova. All are either
paid or receive equity in the company.

Given their busy schedules, the founders believe organizing too many
meetings can detract from their progress. They hold a monthly "All
Hands on Deck" (AHoD) meeting. "Basically, we just want to give
everyone a chance to ask any questions and discuss progress to
date," said Leaman. "Other than AHoD, each department is responsible
for setting and meeting their own goals."

The team applied to the $100k New Ventures Competition twice before
their recent win. "What separated this application from our past
entries was traction," says Kopit. "Before, we had an idea, a basic
product, and some companies expressing interest, but this time we
had actual, paying users."

Alumni, established entrepreneurs, investors, faculty, lawyers, and
technical experts screened sixty applications for the 2016
competition. Eighteen teams—six in each of the Life Sciences, Social
Impact and General/High Tech tracks—moved to the final round where
they pitched their ideas to a panel of judges and answered their
questions in front of a live audience. "You generally know where the
potential holes are in your business, but a judge could always throw
you a curveball. In front of an audience," says Leaman. "You just do
your best and be honest."

Their prize money will be devoted to server space and technology
licensing to improve their product. The team also won the
competition's Audience Choice Award, presented to the project that
event attendees deem has the most potential. "It was great
validation, and we've allotted the Audience Choice Award to morale
spending on food and fun," says Arbaugh.

As they finish their junior year and look ahead to graduation, the
Mimir leadership contemplates the company's future. "We've had this
company for almost three years and we've only been selling a product
for the past six months," says Kopit. The team believes that with
three clients, it's worth their continued time investment.

The team is aware that the final product could go in many
directions, depending on the data added. Leaman envisions the
product "evolving into a powerful suite of sales and marketing tools
for the biotech industry and then expanding into other industries."
It's most important, explains Arbaugh, that they build a company
they are proud of: "We want to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of
hyper-growth startups and build a company with sound financials and
a healthy culture."